Speculation: The Silence, The Girl, and Those Other Guys

[promethia_tenk]

Head has been entirely too full of theories and spec lately (anybody else really looking forward to the hiatus?), so here's a few strands of possibly related, possibly unrelated theories that I've had floating around and needed to write down so as to get them out and see how crazy they sound.  All of the "things are never quite what they seem" variety.

Spoilers for all aired episodes.

First off, I'm thinking about all of this in the context of my argument that Time Girl who regenerated in DotM is the Doctor and River's child.  Barring that, I'm pretty sure Time Girl and Amy's baby are not the same person, so all of this assumes that we are dealing with two separate children.  

After my initial post on the topic, I came up with a pet theory on how Time Girl might have been separated from the Doctor and River, which also might account for why River's timeline seems so screwed up this season and why whoever kidnapped Amy is interested in her baby.  Reproduced from here:

We have some indication from the show that we're dealing in alternate timelines/universes. Say that in the timeline that's "supposed" to happen the Doctor lives to see many more regenerations, the Doctor and River's timeline is long and properly timey-wimey as suggested in previous seasons, and they have a child together sometime in both their personal futures relative to TIA/DotM. But then at the beginning of this season . . . we see Eleven die! What effects does this have? Well, it royally screws up River's timeline for one thing, since now she only has Ten and Eleven to know, leaving her whole story short and tragic and much more linear than we previously thought. And if 1103-year-old Eleven died before they had that kid, then the future!Doctor and future!River who are Time Girl's parents effectively cease to exist. So what happens to Time Girl? Maybe she ceases to exist too, but it's also possible that she could be left behind in this altered timeline as an anomaly (this happened to Team TARDIS in The Big Bang--they were all products of the universe with stars, left behind in the universe without stars, even though the events that formed their history had no longer happened). This would mean that Time Girl wasn't stolen from her parents--which, elisi rightly points out, is hard to believe they would allow to happen--but got unknowingly orphaned, much as Amy was when her parents were eaten by the crack. And, just as with Amy perhaps, fixing the universe means giving a little girl her parents back.

The rules for what disappears when a person disappears from time seem a bit vague, but it seems like most evidence of them vanishes with the possible exception of little traces the universe forgot about. So if you had some cache of family photos, it seems quite likely to me that all the ones with mom and dad in them might disappear, leaving just the ones with Time Girl alone, plus a stray picture of an old family friend with her own baby . . . all ready for a bunch of opportunistic aliens to pick through when they find this miracle child and take her away for whatever it is they're trying to do with her. And then what if, looking at the available evidence, they get entirely the wrong idea about who mom is and decide to track her down and kidnap her in the hopes of getting more of the same from her? (The question of "why are they so interested in Amy?" has been bugging be something fierce lately.)

^^^^I came up with the above before we had the revelation about Amy's kidnapping, so I could also see how Time Girl might have been stolen in a similar manner, but I'm not sure if it must be that way . . .

The following thoughts I've been musing over partly in response to this post by bendingwind :


--We've been lead to believe this season is all about the Silence, but is it possible that whoever is behind Amy's kidnapping is a different force entirely, possibly one in opposition to the Silence? It would explain the two conflicting meanings we have going on of "Silence will fall." Is that a good or a bad thing, from the perspective of the Silence? And is it possible that whoever was behind the Alliance, the Pandorica, and the exploding TARDIS last season was not the Silence, but someone trying to defeat them? The voice in the TARDIS didn't sound like the Silents we heard in TIA/DotM. If we did have that scale of conflict going on, it could be something like a replay of the Time War and the willingness of the Time Lords to end the universe in order to gain the upper hand.

--If the above is true, is what we're seeing with Time Girl and Amy and Amy's baby something like an arms race?  I'd been thinking about how the situation around Time Girl seemed very different from what was going on with Amy.  The set up in 1969 with the Silence and the astronaut suit seemed very low-rent and cobbled together, whereas whoever took Amy seems much more polished and high-tech and (based on the prequel) from the 51st century.  Possibly we are seeing the evolution of the Silence's attempts to engineer Time Babies?  But if we're actually dealing with two opposing forces, that too might explain the differing technologies and circumstances.  It's a bit unclear whether the Silence have time travel abilities of their own--they do have those proto-TARDISes.

--This could explain some apparent inconsistencies with what's going on with Amy. We don't quite know when whoever kidnapped Amy and replaced her with a ganger did so, but my money's on it happening in the warehouse, during that weird, disjointed series of flashbacks we got. Before that Amy believed she was pregnant and after that she didn't anymore. And the first time she saw eyepatch lady was after the warehouse but before she was kidnapped by the Silence. If the Silence were the ones who replaced her with a ganger, why kidnap her *again* from the orphanage? Of course, we still don't know why the Silence kidnapped Amy at all--apparently so they could keep her tied to a chair and make vague allusions about the future. Possibly whoever kidnapped Amy tried to steal Time Girl from the Silence first, failed but found Time Girl's room, and got the same idea Amy did from the photos so they just decided to nab mom instead and produce another Time Girl of their own?

--There's also weird inconsistencies going on with Time Girl here. She claims that she's scared of the spaceman--that he's going to eat her--and everyone assumes she means the astronaut. But in order to make those calls, she needed to be in the astronaut suit already. So who is this spaceman, then? Maybe the people who kidnapped Amy? Or, possibly, the Doctor has been described as "spaceman" in the past, and Moff has been known to play with protective parent/threatening parent ideas before ("eat your children" is a phrase that comes up in Jekyll, also the threat of the space shark in ACC is of being eaten--River is symbolized in ACC by both Abigail and the space shark). Interesting that both times that Time Girl asks for help it is with Amy there (who she might recognize from the photo?), but when the Doc, River, Rory, and Canton show up she hides from them.  Who is she scared of?  Who is she running from?

--Lastly, is it perhaps even possible that the Silence's intentions with Time Girl are benign? They find this girl, realize she's something special, possibly something whoever kidnapped Amy would want to get their hands on, and hide her away? It does look like they tried to give her some of the comforts of childhood--gave her toys, photos and decorations, a human guardian (note the bowtie). Could the spacesuit be an attempt to give her a means to defend herself so that she doesn't have to stay in a little fortress room all the time?

Ok, think my head's a bit clearer now . . .

Comments

[bendingwind.livejournal.com]

The more I think about it--and read your thoughts on the matter, which helps because you tend to have a much more clearer way of wording things than my brain has of thinking them--the more I really do think the Silence are protecting regenerating girl to the best of their ability. If she were just a tool--or even a weapon--they would not have provided her with a human caretaker, toys, pictures... I also think it's worth noting that the pseudo-TARDIS had clearly been allowed to fall into disrepair. I really don't think they had any intention of utilizing it--they were merely storing it, perhaps guarding it from people who would use it for evil purposes, and guarding the regenerating girl for very much the same reason.

IS. IT. SATURDAY. YET.

(And you're excited for the hiatus now, but I guarantee you the finale is only going to leave us with even more questions than we already have and then you'll be stuck with theories on those stewing around in your brain for months.)

[owlboy]

Maybe Time Girl is the lovechild of the Doctor and Marilyn Munroe.....

IDK

Is it Saturday

[cinderbella333.livejournal.com]

I'm both looking forward to the break and am scared of it. My head hurts from being fed all these disconnected pieces of evidence that we know we're going to need to know later but make little sense now. I look forward to having the break in order to absorb it all and perhaps have the ability to write something. However, I have the feeling that we're still going to be left with more knowledge but also more questions and I'm not sure I'll be able to write anything because I'm pretty certain the Doctor and/or River element is going to be largely in flux. So, to be quite honest, S6 has been mostly about frustration for me. I'm sure I'd love it if I had the ability to watch it all in one go. However, because I can't, I'm just enjoying reading other people's theories (like your own), not investing too strongly in my own (which are generally very close to those you've posted here), and trying not to think about it too much. Because otherwise, this could all drive me mad with speculation.

[rumpelsnorcack.livejournal.com]

I'm so confused by it all that I have very few coherent theories at all. However, I reckon Amy was taken before TIA (her love of checks certainly started before then). A lot was made in some circles of the fact that Amy was drinking in TIA and yet not much later she tells the Doctor she's pregnant. What if it's Ganger Amy (who isn't pregnant) who's drinking but real Amy's knowledge bleeds through because somewhere she does know she IS pregnant? We've seen some of real Amy's reality coming through with the eye patch lady, why not with this as well? Obviously it changes very little about your theories, though it would add a bit to the idea that it wasn't the Silence who kidnapped real Amy, possibly.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I wish I had smart things to add, but I don't - I really don't know who that regenerating kid is, but like you, I'm suspicious it's not Amy's (though I guess I also wouldn't be surprised if it were as simple as that theory being true). However, I do think that Eyepatch Lady and the Silence may well not be in cahoots for another reason too - the Silence want Amy to tell the Doctor she's pregnant, to the point they use a hypnotic suggestion to make her do it at a really weird time - in fact, right before you hypothesize she gets taken (and I agree that's a good candidate for when it happens; I'd been imagining it could be in the three month gap between episodes, but yours makes more sense). Meanwhile, whoever kidnapped her went to lengths to cover up both the fact she was kidnapped and, probably, that she was pregnant (though that could have just been a side-effect of replacing her with the Flesh). And the pregnancy was the mechanism by which the Doctor realised Amy wasn't there anymore. So did the Silence deliberately tip off the Doctor to the kidnapping? If so, does that affect whether they were also behind it?

THOUGHTS. *EXPLODES*

[owlboy]

thought: Maybe Time Girl doesn't have parents, but is the Silence attempt at making a Time Lord? Perhaps to trap the Doctor somehow, or to run their DIY TARDIS?

[darkraku.livejournal.com]

I could actually see that working. We know the DIY!TARDIS, if controlled by The Doctor, who rip open the world - if the information we got from "The Lodger" - about the DIY!TARDIS - still remains constant. I like to think that the mind of the DIY!TARDIS is trapped within the Little Girl. As we saw in "The Doctor's Wife" the minds don't last long - hence why she needs a suit to keep her alive. Perhaps they could have infused it with the AmyGanger so the RealAmy passed it onto her child. They would then set up an extremely complicated plot which forced The Doctor to bring the child back to the DIY!TARDIS and re-upload her and help her escape. In the process, blowing up everything and getting stuck in "Amy's Time". As has been shown, time is very much in whack - the variable might have changed but the outcome may remain constant. There is so much to go on.

[sarahandcocoa.livejournal.com]

I still don't know.

It would be a lovely twist if the Silents were benign but something is telling me they're not. The way one brutally kills Joy tells me they are capable killers, and by placing the Time Girl into the spacesuit they were undoubtedly holding a fightened young girl hostage. I like the idea that the Silents capture the Time Girl (whether it be Amy or River's daughter) and cause the TARDIS to explode out of revenge for what Eleven does at the end of DotM. And I think Eleven acted to some extent out of revenge for what they did to him. So you have a paradox - and it's all the Doctor's fault for not realising it. I'd like to see a darker side of the Doctor from now on, either way.

I still don't know about who the Time Girl is. I would say it was River and Eleven's but ... River simply would not let somebody take her child off her! We've seen how protective she is of the Doctor - you have to times that by ten to imagine how protective she'd be over their kid!

[darkraku.livejournal.com]

Episode 7 certainly seems to shows the The Doctor having a darker side.